THE DO-NOTHING CONGRESS
The Do-Nothing Congress HALFWAY through its first session, the 85th Congress is still floundering without purpose or direction. The fact that its record for the first four months is barren of major...
...Several weeks afterward, however, the President reversed himself with a spirited defense of the budget and the specific assertion that talk of cutting $2,000,000,000 was unsound...
...This insubordination drew no response from the team's captain, but it did encourage members of Congress to open fire with a noisy attack on the budget...
...Congress has not yet come to grips with the dominant foreign policy issue of this session—foreign aid or mutual assistance—but there are disturbing indications from the recent epidemic of jeering references to "wasteful give-aways" by both Republicans and Democrats that the axe is being sharpened for a ruthless slash of this supremely important instrument of our foreign relations...
...On October 22 he was specific: there would be $600,000,000 in tax relief for small business if he were reelected...
...By June 1956, 71 per cent thought economic aid more important, 17 per cent military, and 12 per cent didn't know...
...The specific question asked was: "As things stand now, which would you say is more important—to send friendly nations economic aid like machinery and supplies, or to send them military aid like tanks and guns...
...The President promptly hoisted the white flag by allowing as how the budget might be too big and inviting Congress to slash away...
...Senators and Representatives have a habit of brandishing letters from their constituents complaining that foreign economic aid is no more than "pouring money down a rat-hole...
...Thirty-four other Senators joined Senator Fulbright in sponsoring the amendment...
...A nationwide poll conducted in January of this year, for example, showed that 64 per cent of those questioned thought "the aid we are sending to various foreign countries" helped the United States...
...John J. Williams, Delaware, a sternly conservative Republican, proposed, a reduction to 15 per cent on the ground that the rich oil industry was not paying its fair share of taxes...
...There is no doubt about the authenticity of the letters, and there is equally no doubt that they represent an articulate, well-organized, but extremely small minority of the people...
...To prevent any drain on the national treasury, Senator Fulbright's proposal called for a one per cent increase in the tax rates for the other two per cent of industry—the wealthiest corporations in the country...
...Paul H. Douglas, Illinois, a liberal Democrat, sought to achieve a more equitable distribution of the tax burden in oil by introducing an amendment providing for a graduated scale which would give the smallest companies the largest allowance and the wealthiest giants the smallest deduction...
...The prognosis was correct but the reasoning wrong...
...Eisenhower's "modern Republicanism" is of a far more modern vintage...
...Perhaps the most striking and, for us, most heartening, development in the continuing surveys of the National Opinion Research Center is the disclosure that an increasing number of Americans has come to regard economic aid as more important than military assistance...
...Shortly after the President unveiled his budget, his chief financial adviser, Secretary of the Treasury George M. Humphrey, spoke darkly of "a depression that will curl your hair" if the spending spree went on unchecked...
...This is a wholesome development, one that ought to be called to the attention of every member of Congress as that body prepares to debate the issues of foreign aid...
...The keenest of the Washington correspondents are unanimous in their judgment that the dominant bloc of conservative Republicans and Democrats is in a mood to hack away at the foreign aid program, scuttle federal aid for school construction, filibuster civil rights legislation to death, by-pass immigration reform, and ignore just about every measure in the field of social welfare...
...The record of Democratic Senators was better than that of their Republican colleagues, but they squandered their advantage on a related issue because it involved oil, which is so close to the hearts of the Texans who rule the Democratic majority in Congress...
...Both amendments were shouted down in the Senate without a roll call...
...In fact, there are a great many other polls of public opinion which need to be served up on Congressional desks, for overwhelmingly they show a more mature outlook on major issues of domestic and foreign policy than is being exhibited in this first session of the 85th Congress...
...The President's decent instincts are well worded, as, for example, in his recent utterances on federal aid to education and foreign aid, but there is no fight in him, no sustained effort to break through Congressional inertia and opposition...
...But on the same day, in fact at almost the same moment, the Administration's teamwork fell apart again when Mr...
...Both parties vied with each other during the 1956 campaign in promising assistance to that step-child of the American economy...
...For years the powerful oil industry has been the beneficiary of the most gaping loop-hole in the federal tax laws—the 27^2 per cent allowance for depletion...
...A recent Gallup Poll showed, for example, that fewer than six per cent of the populace wrote their Congressmen during the last year on all m$ jects, foreign and domestic...
...Much of the Congressional resistance to a boldly conceived program of foreign economic aid is rooted in the conviction of the lawmakers that the great majority of Americans is opposed to this approach as expensive, wasteful, and unproductive...
...A poll taken in September 1956 found 85 per cent approving technical aid to underdeveloped countries...
...When the amendment came to a vote, it was defeated 52 to 33, largely because of almost solid Republican opposition...
...President Eisenhower seems less sure of where he stands, less anxious to become embroiled in a major struggle with Congress, less concerned with the hard chores of the Presidency, less in command of his own "team" of Cabinet heads and White House aides than at any time during his first term in the White House...
...Members of Congress who base their opposition to foreign aid on the tiny proportion of constituents who write might give serious consideration to a far more scientific sampling of public opinion conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago...
...Under Congressional rules this was in all probability the last chance the Senate would have to pass on tax relief for small business...
...The White House "team" bestirred itself just twice— once to do the bidding of the nation's most powerful bankers in whipsawing Republican members of the House of Representatives into defeating a resolution calling for a House investigation of national monetary policy, and, on the second occasion, to fight a proposal in the Senate that would have provided a modest measure of tax relief for American small business enterprise...
...In June 1951, 51 per cent thought that economic aid was more important, 27 per cent military aid, and 22 per cent didn't know...
...Senators Williams and Douglas demanded a record vote so that the nation could know where the individual lawmakers stood on the issue, but neither could secure the ten seconds required for a roll call—so great was the desire of the Senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, to conceal their position in the anonymity of a voice vote...
...When the session convened in January, there was widespread concern that a running clash between Republican leadership in the White House and Democratic leadership in Congress might produce legislative paralysis...
...There has been no leadership, either in Congress or in the White House...
...They could not resist pressure from the Administration, although Mr...
...For his is a fiery determination to stand pat on the New Deal-Fair Deal programs of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman...
...Last month Senator William J. Ful-bright, Arkansas Democrat, proposed an amendment to tax legislation pending before the Senate which would have provided $400,000,000 in tax relief for the small business concerns which constitute 98 per cent of the nation's corporations...
...Nine of them were Republicans...
...Eisenhower had himself pledged $200,000,000 more in tax relief for small business than was provided in the Fulbright amendment...
...Several Republican Senators made it clear they had voted to kill the amendment against their better judgment...
...The Southern Bourbons who rule the Democratic majority in Congress are wedded to a do-nothing policy...
...But the day after they agreed to sign the measure, four of the Republican sponsors asked to have their names withdrawn—as a result of extraordinary White House pressure...
...Paralysis set in almost immediately, but not because of a clash of leadership...
...Eisenhower's fumbling hand at the helm was most in evidence during he preliminary skirmishes over his 171,800,000,000 budget—largest in the peacetime history of the United States...
...The fact that its record for the first four months is barren of major achievement is not nearly so disturbing, given the ceremonial slowness of the Congressional process, as the prospect that it is bent on paralleling this aimless, empty performance in the second four months...
...Eisenhower's Undersecretary of the Treasury, W. Randolph Burgess, directly contradicted his chief by solemnly testifying that the budget "could be cut $2,000,-000,000 to $3,000,000,000 and that would be a sound thing to do...
...The clearest-cut trend in the series of polls is the fact that support for foreign aid programs is increasing steadily in all sections of the country...
...The circumstances surrounding the defeat of the attempt to aid small business typify the mood of both the executive and legislative branches of our government today...
...Eisenhower promised "special tax measures" to relieve small business...
...Another survey during the same month found that 52 per cent approved economic assistance to neutralist nations like India even though they have declined to be tied into our global network of anti-Communist military alliances...
...When he decided to defend his budget, the President spoke in the rounded phrases of "modern Republicanism"—not in the jocular vein used by its founder and philosopher, Arthur Larson, when he is said to have defined the purpose of "modern Republicanism" as "never to put off until tomorrow what should have been done in 1873...
...In a campaign speech October 1, Mr...
Vol. 21 • May 1957 • No. 5
